CH 1: Margaret Oliphant, one of the first Scotswomen to make a living as a professional writer, looked to Walter Scott to legitimate her pragmatic understandings of authorship as a skilled trade and literature as a form of entertainment rather than a source of spiritual truths. In her autobiography and her novels, Oliphant drew on Scott’s example to explore the inverse relationship between literature’s aesthetic and economic value. Both her sentimental Scottish romances and her masterfully ironic Chronicles of Carlingford declare the superiority of skilled craftmanship to inspired genius as source of literary and artistic production. The Chronicles of Carlingford became a touchstone for later Scottish women writers by articulating an aesthetics of the ordinary and affirming the vast importance that seemingly mundane events occupy in the lives of most people. But it was in her romances that Oliphant defined her own relationship to Scottish literary tradition by feminizing the chivalric adventures of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.

The development of the Victorian ghost story can be contextualised in relation to an array of interleaving discourses of the unseen: the science of optics; the advent of new, invisible technologies that constituted a form of modern supernatural; and the rise of Spiritualism and the pseudo-scientific investigation of the paranormal. Many ghost story writers explored, even embraced, the spectral effects of modernity and the ghost story flourished in an historical moment when scientific and technological progress was shadowed by the occult. For women writers, the ghost story is a tale of increasing visibility and opportunity: in a climate of social and political reform, women occupied a prominent role in the genre, exploiting the growing appetite for popular and marketable writing, particularly in shorter forms. The chapter explores how the Victorian ghost story provided an often oblique vision of gender and class inequalities, and raised fundamental questions about faith and knowledge.

This chapter discusses the use of Gothic convention in four nineteenth-century Scottish writers: Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant and Robert Louis Stevenson. Proceeding by means of an account of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s recitation of William Taylor’s English translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s supernatural ballad ‘Lenore’ in Edinburgh in 1794, it shows how Scottish writers from this moment onwards were inspired to merge the conventions of Gothic poetry with the balladic and folkloric traditions of their own country. What resulted, the chapter shows, was that distinctive form of textually complex writing that characterises much Scottish Gothic writing of the period, a mode that, in its preoccupations with dialogic voices, splitting and uncanny doubling, enacted some of the political and cultural tensions that lay at the heart of the nation itself.